Have you seen Food Flirts?

8 years ago

I've just seen the first two episodes of Food Flirts on PBS. I was intrigued by a promo. Parts, as expected, are a little cringy, but the ladies manage to keep it real most of the time. The premise is that two over 70 Jewish sisters from the Boston area go exploring foods they're not familiar with making, and then do a fusion at home.

I grew up on fusion food. Most families I knew were culturally mixed, and the friends and neighbors were even more mixed, so it was normal to have all kinds of foods thrown together. We've also had lots of restaurants that do mashups of the chef's cultural influences, long before "fusion" was a culinary word. I didn't know until I joined this forum and posted a what's for dinner to great disapprobation for combining udon with a European-ish almond sauce, that I learned that ethnic purity in a meal was considered a must and fusion was disdained. That's more foreign to me than Korean tagines.

So here come the Brass sisters, celebrating the mashup in the most straightforward, homecookery way. The production values are decent--good sound, no shadows, etc.--but still has a kind of home video feel. The ladies spend too much time talking about the flirting, but that's the first two episodes and it is their schtick. It may calm down as the show gains its footing. They're actually quite charming in a pushy broad kind of way. They had me when they were talking about pastrami (one of the themes of the episode) and were reminiscing about their uncle whose cigar and pastrami sandwiches made strong olfactory impressions, and one said, "The smell of pastrami is Proustian. Our Madeleine."

Their faceless but not unseen producer, Bruce, takes them to experience some interesting food at a small restaurant. They go in the back and learn how to make it. Then they go to a very different one, and do the same. Then they go home--it looks like a real apartment, though it could be a real apartment they're using as a set--and make some dishes they tried and their fusion dish with what they've learned, and have the restaurant people who taught them over to eat it. In the pastrami and ramen episode, they made a pastrami ramen noodle kugel! So that was a mash up of learning to make ramen noodles and soup, learning to make pastrami, and their own if it's a noodle it could be a kugel selves.

In both episodes, the ladies say that they've brought a major ingredient from the restaurant where they learned to make it. In the first, the dough for dosa, in the second, slices of the pastrami. These ladies are obviously good cooks, but I don't blame them for not making everything they learned by themselves. I mean, who makes a whole pastrami at home to get a few slices when there are experts down at the deli? I like this home cooking POV a lot. They're not trying to be Martha Stewart. Or even our beloved Annie.

Anyway, I find a lot of the let's go see what's cooking at the restaurant shows somewhere between inoffensive white noise and soporific blather. The Food Flirts are fun, funny, interesting, fearless, a little cheesy, a little cringy, and hard to take one's eyes off of.

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Comments (3)

sleevendog (5a NY 6aNYC NL CA)
8 years ago
last modified: 8 years ago
Yes, I've caught a couple episodes by channel surfing. I had to google 'PBS FoodFlirts' to see if that was the same. Did not know the show name.

Cute and oddly flirty, "The Food Flirts are fun, funny, interesting, fearless, a little cheesy, a little cringy, and hard to take one's eyes off of." ....yes, I agree.

I do like cooking shows that visit a restaurants kitchen. Always learn a few tricks.

The episodes are on youtube now.

I don't really get that from the 'what's for dinner' anymore. I'm 50/50. Authentic/traditional/culturally correct, ethnic based on the world region, is interesting and important. Sometimes the cooking police about spelling and history lessons I can do without but I do like the 'why' for the most part. My other 50% is fresh/local/seasonal.

A young country of first generation immigrants brought their traditions but had to adapt to what was available. NYC is probably about 50/50. Authentic restaurants and those that 'fuse' by using fresh/local/seasonal.

My only beef with American foods is the 50's 60's obsession with convenient processed and fast foods created by the big money-hog businesses. Creating a country of overweight and sick. Thanksgiving became canned cranberry, marshmallows, jello....even canned green beans with canned onion topping, canned onion soup, etc. We never did that as a family but my in-laws did. Fortunately my nephews on that side of the family recently married vegetarian yoga healthy eaters, lol. My MIL did not like her grandsons requests every year for the junk but that has changed. Thankfully. She got sucked into the early cooking magazines that used processed/convenient foods in everything via advertising.
User
8 years ago
Yes. The name of the show is terrible, but they are fun to watch

They sound, and cook like all my New England relatives.
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plllog
Original Author
8 years ago
I think we can all get a little proprietary with our food, and I do love food history, but I get sick of "experts" on TV saying you can't mix "summer" and "winter" produce when they're both freshly grown. We have different growing seasons where I live than they do in the NE and Northern Europe. Let alone the anti-fusionists. But at least in this forum we can have healthy exchanges. I've promised Islay not to say "ratatouille" for the version my mother taught me, which includes license to throw in anything in the fridge. And years ago, I had a lovely back and forth with Marcolo over sfingi. He said that's not the right spelling, though it's fair on the sound, and that they were specifically for St. Joseph's Day. I told him that Jews have been borrowing local delicious fried goodies for Hanukkah for centuries. He was cool with that. :) But that you must make your home dinner exactly appropriate to a single ethnic cuisine or it's wrong attitude is apparently fairly widespread in parts far from where I live.

I agree about when you actually see the restaurant kitchens. Like DDD. I don't seek it out, but it's often compelling as you see how people cook this or that (and occasionally crazy making when they're using residential appliances inadequate to the job, and don't know some of the basic tricks). There are so many other shows that are really just about eating, however. I liked Bourdain's CNN show, though I rarely caught it, because it wasn't really about the food at all, but the food as in introduction to the locals and their cultures.

Have you seen Food Flirts?

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sleevendog (5a NY 6aNYC NL CA)

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Have you seen Food Flirts?

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sleevendog (5a NY 6aNYC NL CA)

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